The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
by Cormac McCarthy
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Book Summary Information
Author: Cormac McCarthyEdition: Paperback
Published: 2007-03-28
ISBN: 0307387895
Number of pages: 287
Publisher: Vintage Books
Book Reviews of The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
Book Review: The Gnostic Prophet's Fable of Apocalypse
Summary: 4 Stars
Cormac McCarthy has had a surge of creative productivity recently, with an unprecedented volume of manuscripts coming to print. This release is another assault on new territories, being McCarthy's first and possibly only foray into sci-fi. His ouevre to date has been fed by a diligent scholarship, anchoring his imagination in some historic milieu (most notably, Blood Meridian, drawing heavily on Samuel Chamberlain's accounts of the Indian conquests). The Road, however, is the first novel McCarthy has set in a time not yet come. His capacity to re-invent his terms of reference and offer us something refreshingly different, albeit always with that unmistakeable signature of gothic poesy, is a hallmark of his prodigious talent.
A linear, episodic novel, this book charts the road-trip of a nameless father and son as they journey through blasted wastes of ash and fire, heading coastward in search of warmer climes, the sun blotted out by clouds of post-apocalyptic smog. It is an utterly haunting memoir of a desolate, ruined world traversed by a father and his young son, the latter stiff with fear. Roaming cannibalistic hordes threaten their safe passage, and mysterious mendicants, vagabonds and chain-gangs constantly menace the delicate safety that the father seeks to circle round his son. Amidst this Mad Max of horror, moments of painful tenderness punctuate the destruction. The testimony of love that survives the scorched absolution of our planet is the novel's redeeming grace. It may be that all of McCarthy's writing has been narrowing in on this place. As a grand-master of American death literature growing old, the presence of oblivion and nothingness has been expanding in the textual and imaginative fields of his prose (his last novel, another breakthrough as McCarthy turned his hand to hard-boiled crime thriller - with lashings of secret allusion and literary resonance for the astute - was itself textually patterned with intimations of nothingness, successfully lending a terrifying undercurrent to the surface thriller). It is wrought in McCarthy's trademark language, albeit leaner and more pared than the gothic baroque of Suttree or Blood Meridan, and has luminous spots of beauty located amidst the ash and decay. It will thrill hardcore McCarthy supporters. Occasionally let down by moments of cloying rheum and lapses of saccharine schmalz, however, as the universal father expresses his love for his heir, these are merely local blemishes that fail to mar an epic fable. McCarthy is the finest living American writer, and he cements his status with this latest offering.
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